A mother's plea to Trump: If you want to encourage a baby boom, give families a break

Los Angeles Times

a day ago

This column is the latest in a series on parenting children in the final years of high school, 'Emptying the Nest.' Read the previous installment, about last first day of school, here.
My third and youngest child is about to graduate high school and I am thrilled. If I have done nothing else in this crazy life, I have helped hoist three marvelous kids to legal adulthood and sent them all off to college.
For the last 12 months, I've been crawling to the finish line — why is filling out the FAFSA form always such a nightmare? — and here it is, shining before me! A world with no AP classes, basketball fundraisers or backpacks disgorging papers that I should have signed last week.
I've been dutifully chronicling all the various 'lasts,' hers and ours — last college application, last high school final, last Monday morning — and I haven't cried once, not even while taking pre-prom photos of her with her friends-since-kindergarten (though my stomach won't stop hurting and somehow I've tweaked my back twice). I'm totally on top of it — the announcements, the post-grad mini-break plans, the bin filling up with things she'll need in college (if only I could stop forgetting where I put things I just had in my hand).
Parenting most certainly will not end when she steps off that graduation stage, but it is lovely that all the emails from her college of choice are addressed to her. As a lowly CC, I am no longer the nexus of information or the potential recipient of furious commentary — 'Oh my God, mom, do you even read your emails?' (Someday, she too will know what it is like to have three email addresses, Slack and a phone that continually buzzes with texts and calls).
Where did I put my phone anyway?
Sure, there is a grimy section of wall outside our bedroom that I cannot bring myself to clean because it bears the rising height marks of my kids and, yes, I may have been staring at it a bit more frequently.
But I knew what I was getting into. Motherhood is a permanent gig, but if we're lucky, after 18 years or so (or in my case, a cumulative 27), much of it will be done remotely.
And not to steal my daughter's thunder, but I can't help thinking that her father and I should get matching watches or at the very least a cake. I'm about to sit through a bunch of speeches from 18-year-olds offering words of inspiration and advice, and it seems to me that graduating parents deserve their own ceremony (albeit with a tighter time schedule, more comfortable chairs and, for those who imbibe, an open bar).
Especially now.
As I contemplate the end of almost three decades of frontline parenting, many around the world are concerned about the fact that an increasing number of young folks are deciding to give the whole thing a pass. Declining birth rates have sparked such dire predictions of a collapsing workforce and shrinking tax base that President Trump recently announced that he and his administration are looking into ways to foster a new baby boom.
While I am not convinced that this planet needs more people stripping its resources and raising its temperature, I wouldn't mind (after a bit of a breather) having a few grandchildren. So as I emerge from the trenches, I have a few valedictory thoughts about how to make parenthood more appealing for my children and yours.
I cannot imagine life without my children. But it is difficult and exhausting work to be in charge of vulnerable creatures whose bodies and brains are in ever-shifting stages of development. People who for years are literally incapable of reason, much less getting their own dinner or finding the six baby gerbils that 'somehow' got loose in the bedroom. People who see both going to bed and getting up as torture (except on weekends when they're up at dawn). Who beg for a dog and then look at you as if you're Miss Trunchbull when you ask them to take it for a walk.
For years, children rely on their parents for every single thing every single day. While we get ulcers worrying about jobs, bills and whether or not our fire insurance will be revoked, they are throwing fits over who sits where in the car or why their T-shirt feels scratchy.
And then, just when they are actually capable of, say, folding sheets, picking up groceries or helping us set up our new phone, they up and leave home!
Honestly, when you consider the job description (which, as it turns out, includes a mild but comprehensive physical breakdown when the last one graduates), it's a wonder anyone signs up for it at all.
So as I prepare to launch my youngest into the wide world with all the joy and bittersweet sorrow one mother's heart can hold, I am happy to give the president the most obvious piece of advice he will ever receive.
If you want to increase this country's birth rate, do everything you can to make it easier to be a parent.
And please, for the love of God, fix the FAFSA website.